According to the most recent findings based on the Big Bang theory, the universe is 13.7 billion years old, give or take 200 million years.

An international astronomy team, headed by Richard Ellis from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), presented its findings on Wednesday, July 11, 2007 in front of members from the Geological Society in London, England. The title of the talk is called “From IRAS to Herschel and Planck”.

In order to accomplish their vast journey back into time, they used natural gravitational lenses and the 10-meter Keck II telescope at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

The natural gravitational lenses enabled the astronomers to increase the number of millions of years they could look back into time. The magnifying process was accomplished by watching as light bent (curved) around a massive cluster of galaxies and then looking at the cluster’s boundary to the space past it. Ellis says such a natural technique provides about twenty times the magnification for their telescope.

This very early time for the universe occurred before stars had even completely formed. However, galaxies had formed and the CalTech team found six galaxies that were in the midst of forming stars—what are surmised to be the universe’s first stars.

Astronomers call this period of the universe—starting around 300,000 million years after the Big Bang—the “Dark Age” because stars had yet to begin giving off visible light. They are very interested in learning when stars first began to shine, thus, ending the Dark Age of the universe. Scientists are hopeful that they will be able to determine this important information with the future use of such telescopes as the Caltech’s optical and infrared Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), which is scheduled to be completed in the middle part of the 2010s, and NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) (what is considered the replacement for the Hubble Space Telescope), scheduled to be launched into space no earlier than 2013.

Supporting this study is the near-completed study of U.S. (Caltech) astronomer Johan Richard, French (Laboratory of Astrophysics at Marseilles) astronomer Jean-Paul Kneib, and English (University of Birmingham) astronomer Graham Smith who have used the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes to perform similar observations.

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